News tips
and press releases may be sent to editor at hollywoodinvestigator.com. All submissions become property of the Hollywood Investigator and deemed for
publication without compensation unless otherwise requested. Name
and contact information only withheld upon request. Prospective reporters should research our Bookstore.

PIRATE PARTY: COPYRIGHT LAWS THREATEN ONLINE FREEDOM

by Christian Engström, guest contributor [July 14. 2009]

[HollywoodInvestigator.com]If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not "ours" at all.

On MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixes for others to enjoy -- until they are replaced by take-down notices handed out by big film and record companies.

Technology opens up possibilities. Copyright law shuts them down.

This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform.

But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without being monitored.

File-sharing occurs whenever one individual sends a file to another. The only way to limit this process is to monitor all communications between ordinary people. Despite the crackdown on Napster, Kazaa, and other peer-to-peer services over the past decade, the volume of file-sharing has grown exponentially.

Even if the authorities closed down all other possibilities, people could still send copyrighted files as attachments to emails or through private networks. If people do that, should we give the government the right to monitor all email and all encrypted networks?

Whenever there are ways of communicating in private, they will be used to share copyrighted material. If you want to stop people doing this, you must remove the right to communicate in private. There is no other option. Society must make a choice.

The world is at a crossroads. The internet and new information technologies are so powerful that no matter what we do, society will change. But the direction has not been decided.

Technology could be used to create a Big Brother society beyond our nightmares, where governments and corporations monitor every detail of our lives.

In the former East Germany, the government needed tens of thousands of employees to keep track of citizens, using typewriters, pencils, and index cards. Today a computer can do the same thing a million times faster. At the push of a button.

There are many politicians who want to push that button.

The same technology could instead be used to create a society that embraces spontaneity, collaboration, and diversity. Where citizens are no longer passive consumers being fed information and culture through one-way media, but are instead active participants, collaborating on a journey into the future.

The internet is still in its infancy, but already we see fantastic things appearing as if by magic. Take Linux, the free computer operating system. Or Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Witness the participatory cultures of MySpace and YouTube. Or the growth of Pirate Bay, which makes the world's culture easily available to anybody with an internet connection.

But where technology opens up new possibilities, our intellectual property laws restrict them. Linux is held back by patents. The rest of the examples by copyright.

The public increasingly recognizes the need for reform. That was why Piratpartiet -- the Pirate Party -- won 7.1% of the popular vote in Sweden in the European Union elections. This gave us a seat in the European Parliament for the first time.

Our manifesto is to reform copyright laws and gradually abolish the patent system. We oppose mass surveillance and censorship on the net, as in the rest of society. We want to make the EU more democratic and transparent. This is our entire platform.

We intend to devote all our time and energy to protecting fundamental civil liberties on the net and elsewhere. Seven percent of Swedish voters agreed with us that it makes sense to put other political differences aside in order to ensure this.

Political decisions taken over the next five years are likely to set the course we take into the information society, and will affect the lives of millions for many years into the future.

Will we let our fears lead us toward a dystopian Big Brother state? Or will we have the courage and wisdom to choose an exciting future in a free and open society?

The information revolution is happening here and now. It is up to us to decide what future we want.

Christian Engström is the Pirate Party's member in the European Parliament. This article first appeared in the Financial Times of London, July 7, 2009.

"Hollywood Investigator" and "HollywoodInvestigator.com" and "Tabloid Witch" and "Tabloid Witch Award" trademarks are currently unregistered, but pending registration upon need for protection against improper use. The idea of marketing these terms as a commodity is a protected idea under the Lanham Act. 15 U.S.C. s 1114(1) (1994) (defining a trademark infringement claim when the plaintiff has a registered mark); 15 U.S.C. s 1125(a) (1994) (defining an action for unfair competition in the context of trademark infringement when the plaintiff holds an unregistered mark). All content is copyright by HollywoodInvestigator.com unless otherwise noted.